The Centre for Fashion Studiesat Stockholm University, Sweden, and University IUAV of Venice, Italy, organize a two-day workshop for International PhD students, in occasion of the conference "FASHION ISSUES: Critical Fashion Studies" that will be held in Stockholm (16-17 May 2014). The workshop aims to explore and enlarge the concept of “sustainable fashion”.

In the public discourse, this term has been mostly related to issues of environmental hazard, globalization, child labour, and social and economic inequality. While this has helped to denounce and raise awareness on problems behind the practices of clothing and textile industries, less attention has been given to other ethical and political aspects that the term “sustainable fashion” may involve for fashion designers, producers and consumers; at a small or large scale; at mass-market or niche luxury level.

“In A Reverse Fashion” opens up to these alternative aspects, bringing together PhD students who work in the domain of critical fashion with boundary pushing approaches, including designers, historians, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists. This interdisciplinary approach intends to explore new critical landscapes for the word ‘sustainability’, moving backwards to its etymological connotations that evoke ideas of endurance, resistance, and support. Hence, this workshop aims to rethink these meanings and apply them to the current situation of the fashion industry and culture. PhD students will be asked to discuss issues like the role of fashion design in an era in which fashion houses are creating more than ten collections per year; the working conditions of fashion professionals (from fashion designers to fashion bloggers passing through other intermediary and hidden figures of the chain of creation); new ways of conceiving fashion and new behaviours of consuming it; the increasing role that fashion plays in promoting community-based socio-economic development by national and international NGOs and universities; sustainability issues in a digitally networked and open-access environment; the emergence of specific, and historically situated forms of fashion activism by fashion makers, designers, entrepreneurs and users.

The workshop will run for two days during which the participants will have the chance to present and discuss their research with the convening professors who have notably engaged in their own research with issues of critical fashion and sustainability. In practical terms, the two-day workshop will be as follows: the PhD students will briefly present a sum up of their research and the co-chair professors will review their paper. After that, a common discussion will be held.

Practical Information for Applicants

PhD Students are invited to submit an abstract of 500 wordsabout their PhD research by 24 February 2014. The selected candidates will be informed on the 7th March 2014, and they will have to submit a 5000 words paper with a presentation of their research by 1st May 2014. This paper will be then reviewed by one of the convening professors. More practical information (lunch arrangements, presentations, visual materials, etc..) about the day will be further given by the organizers of the workshop. PhD Students are asked to send their applications to the following e-mail address: centre@fashion.su.se